Compare two Excel files

Match by position, or match by a key column

This is the choice that decides whether a comparison is useful, and most online tools do not offer it.

By position compares row 1 with row 1, row 2 with row 2. It is the right choice when the two files are the same report generated a week apart and nothing has been re-sorted. Insert one row near the top, though, and everything below it reports as changed.

By a key column matches rows on a value you nominate — an order number, an email address, a SKU. Rows can be re-sorted, filtered or interleaved and they still pair up correctly, and you get a real answer to the question you actually had: which records changed, which are new, which disappeared. Choose the column that is unique per row; if the key repeats, matching rows are paired in the order they appear.

What the colors mean

• Orange — the cell exists in both files with different contents. The old value is struck through, the new one follows it.
• Green — present only in the second file. A new row, or a cell that was blank before.
• Red — present only in the first file. A deleted row, or a cell that has been emptied.

The counts above the table are the summary worth pasting into an email: cells that differ, cells identical, rows on one side only.

What this Excel comparison tool does not do

Worth knowing before you trust a clean result:

• It compares values, not formulas. A cell containing =SUM(A1:A9) is compared as the number Excel last calculated. If the formula changed but the result did not, this tool reports no difference.
• It ignores formatting. Bold, fill color, column width, conditional formatting and number formats are not compared. A cell showing 1,234.50 and one showing 1234.5 are the same value and are reported as identical.
• It ignores comments, charts, pivot caches and macros. Only the cell grid is read.
• Dates are read through their format. A date-formatted cell comes back as 2026-03-15 rather than the serial number 46096, so two files that display the same date in different formats compare as equal.

Why "nothing is uploaded" is not a small detail here

The files people most often need to compare are the ones they should not be posting to a stranger's server: payroll runs before and after a raise cycle, a client's trial balance, a patient list, a pricing sheet under NDA. Most free comparison sites upload both files and process them server-side, which is a disclosure whether or not anything bad happens next.

This page does the work in your browser. `sheet.js`, the code that reads the files, contains no network call at all — open your browser's network tab and compare a file to watch nothing happen.

When a browser tab is not the right place

A one-off check is exactly what this page is for. Comparing the same two reports every Monday is not: you end up re-dropping files and re-reading a diff that a tool should be maintaining for you.

TableDI is a desktop spreadsheet workspace that runs entirely on your machine. Import both files once, put them in one workspace, and use the Match formula panel to build a column that flags the differences — it recalculates when you paste next week's numbers in, so the answer is already there when you open it. How the formula panel works.